AbstractsBiology & Animal Science

City/State: Foucault urbanism & risk

by Mark Alexander James Hanlen




Institution: AUT University
Department:
Year: 0
Keywords: Michel Foucault; Governmentality; Urban policy; Biopolitics; Design; Architecture; Housing; Critical theory; Giorgio Agamben; Antonio Negri
Record ID: 1309296
Full text PDF: http://hdl.handle.net/10292/8000


Abstract

The State is the coldest of all cold monsters. Coldly it lies, too; and this lie creeps from its mouth: “I, the State, am the people.” –Friedrich Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathrustra. The city model already dominates the global markets. With the influence of urban violence and warfare, we might find ourselves back with the political system of the city-state. –Eyal Weizman, “Military Operations as Urban Planning.” The short epigraph from Eyal Weizman is taken from a 2003 publication on the future of the city, Cities Without Citizens. Its editorial opens with a kind of simple or naive questioning that resonates strongly with the thesis of this research: “What is a city? What are the laws or constitution that make a city a city, that prevent it from becoming something else, even as it inevitably undergoes transformation and change?” Of course, Cities Without Citizens is neither simple nor naïve. It is an astute and political series of writings on some of the most pressing concerns of human rights, inflecting profoundly on a question of habitation and the urban. This would be my claim for this thesis as well. Its originality and trajectory trace, principally through the political philosophy of Michel Foucault and many theorists of the urban who have engaged Foucault, what that thinker called a “history of the present.” By this he meant how we trace successive relations of power and knowledge such that what we take to be our present, in its contingency and fragility, violence and happiness, has its governmental reason, its conduct of conduct, and its normative techniques for managing risk and contingency. There is another touchstone by which I could present an overview of the critical concerns of this research. It is the September 2011 issue of the journal, Urban Studies, a special issue on the theme, “Renewing Urban Politics,” edited by Gordon MacLeod and Martin Jones. This issue addresses the panoply of concerns in contemporary understandings of urban planning in contexts that the editors and contributors term post-democratic and post-political governmentalities. Address is given to cities in crisis, in bankruptcy, and to widespread movements from welfare to entrepreneurial urban financing, and ontological considerations as to what now constitutes the urban, particularly in contexts where urbanization can no longer be modeled on those academic and professional frameworks that have grown from Eurocentric and Anglo-American traditions. The question remains how do we plan, design, or construct, which is to say, invent futures? What is proposed here is not an imagining of an other city, a city that responds, with greater utility, to crisis. Rather, what is explored is how the present is constructed. What are the contingencies that affect us now, and how are they contingent in their historicality? Foucault proposes that it is through analyzing these events that we see the various historical moves that determine our present. Genealogy shows the historical dimension to a reason that determines our present and in…